John Gardner, 1917-2011 The Ballad of the White Horse by John Gardner. Hilary Davan Wetton conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra, City of London Choir and Paulina Voices, with Ashley Riches, baritone. EMR CD057 STUART MILLSON relishes a forgotten folkish treat In the late 1950s, the English composer, John Gardner (1917-2011) – one of many forgotten…
ALEX PUGH suggests some reasons why the BBC is so leftwing I first worked in the BBC in 1981 in its Birmingham Pebble Mill studio. I well recall its large bar, where I sometimes drank with a middle-aged producer. One day, a Cheltenham MP named Charles Irving was in the news. This producer said to…
Derek Turner welcomes you to The Brazen Head. (Video)
DEREK TURNER tries translating Lingua Ignota Radio 6 is one of the rare good things about the BBC, championing alternative, independent or overlooked pop and rock from the 1950s up to the present. On any evening of any week, you can hear anything from film scores to 1960s psychedelia, prog rock to trip-hop, industrial to…
Gustave Dore illustration for Paradise Lost BARRY SPURR rides to the rescue of the blind visionary When the Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, was at St Paul’s School in London, in the 1920s, John Milton’s 200-line pastoral elegy, ‘Lycidas’, was set for learning by heart by the boys. Decades later, when Berlin visited the newly-established Wolfson…
General Robert E. Lee RONALD MAXWELL says Americans should treat their contested past with imaginative sympathy A speech delivered 7 June 2009 at the annual commemoration of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery Greetings. I am humbled when I see the list of former speakers for this event: the great Civil War historian James…
Head of Medusa, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610 SYDNEY LORD finds a metaphor for cancel culture in mythology Medusa, with her famous hair of writhing snakes, has had many metamorphoses over the centuries – so many the Greeks and Romans stopped counting. After World War II, some feminist activists – which I call ‘femocrats’- used…
Lord Boothby, Reggie Kray and friend The Peer And The Gangster Daniel Smith, The History Press, 2020, hb, 256 pages, £14.99 KEN BELL traces an old and sordid story uniting West End and East The Sunday Mirror thought that it had the scoop of the century in July 1964, when it ran a front-page splash…
GREG JINKERSON pays tribute to an influential exponent of the British imperial ideal In his lifetime, Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (1865-1948) had a reputation as a globetrotting man of action who could turn forays in politics, theater and war into popular and gripping novels. If that had been the sum of his achievement, it would…
Guy Walker is a French and Italian teacher who lives on the south coast of England. He edits the magazine https://www.british-intelligence.co.uk/ and blogs at https://roseatetern.blogspot.com/ Spleen by Charles Baudelaire - English Verse Translation I have a thousand years of memories.A chest of drawers rammed full of elegies, Of served writs, billets doux and balance sheets, Romances, heavy plaits rolled in…